Simon Wiesenthal, Requiescat in pace.

May God have mercy on his brave soul.

Who will remind us now?

Simon Wiesenthal, the Holocaust survivor who dedicated his life to tracking down Nazi war criminals and bringing them to justice, has died. He was 96.

Wiesenthal died in Vienna today, the Simon Wiesenthal Center said in a statement, without giving the cause of death.

The Jewish hunter of the Nazi regime's most elusive war criminals spent almost six decades collecting information on those considered most responsible for the killing of 6 million Jews during World War II.

Wiesenthal said he had helped track down 1,100 Nazis by the time he retired in April 2003, according to Efraim Zuroff, director of the Israeli branch of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem.

``My job is done,'' Wiesenthal told the Austrian magazine Format after his retirement. ``I found the mass murderers I was looking for. I survived them all.''

Amen to that, Brother.

One of his successes was to locate Franz Stangl, the commandant of the Treblinka and Sobibor concentration camps in occupied Poland, who was hiding in Brazil. In 1967, Stangl was sentenced to life in prison, where he died.

Wiesenthal also played a central role in tracking down Karl Silberbauer, the Nazi officer who arrested Anne Frank, the German Jewish teenager who wrote a diary while hiding in an Amsterdam apartment. Silberbauer, who was a police officer in Austria at the time of his arrest, corroborated Frank's story, helping to discredit claims that ``The Diary of Anne Frank'' was a forgery.

Eichmann's Capture

There was much argument about Wiesenthal's actual contribution in snaring Adolf Eichmann, the head of the Gestapo's Jewish department, which sent millions to Nazi concentration camps. Though Wiesenthal played no role in his capture, he prevented Eichmann's wife from declaring her husband dead while he was in hiding, Zuroff said.

Eichmann was captured by Israeli agents in South America and brought to Israel, where he was found guilty of mass murder and executed on May 31, 1961.

In 1973, Hermine Braunsteiner, a housewife living in the New York suburb of Queens, was extradited to Germany after Wiesenthal helped track her down for supervising the extermination of hundreds of children in the Majdanek concentration camp in Poland. Braunsteiner, who was known as ``The Stomping Mare'' for kicking many female inmates to death, was sentenced to life in prison and released three years before she died in 1999.
``He was very important in keeping the subject alive when people weren't that interested,'' Robert Rozett, director of the library at the Jerusalem-based Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority, said in a phone interview. ``He was a lone voice for a long time.'' (Emphasis mine.)

`World's Conscience'

Yad Vashem, which said it received hundreds of files and material from Wiesenthal's Jewish Historical Documentation Center in Linz, Austria, said in a faxed statement that ``in his determination to expose the crimes of Nazis, Wiesenthal was the world's conscience.''

``Yad Vashem mourns this tremendous loss to the Jewish and international community,'' the statement said.

Wiesenthal was born Dec. 31, 1908, in Buczacz, Austria- Hungary, in a region of present-day Ukraine. His father died in World War I and his mother remarried in the town of Simon's birth. Wiesenthal later studied architecture in Prague after a quota restriction on Jewish students kept him out of the Polytechnic Institute in Lvov.

Concentration Camps

He was married and working as an architect in Lvov when the city was occupied by Russian soldiers in 1939. Wiesenthal closed his office and became a mechanic in a bed-spring factory before being sent to a concentration camp just outside Lvov. By September 1942, most of his relatives had been killed.

Wiesenthal spent most of World War II in Nazi concentration camps, separated from his wife, Cyla, who managed to avoid persecution by hiding her Jewish identity. In May 1945, he weighed less than 100 pounds in Austria's Mauthausen camp, which was liberated by American forces. After recovering, Wiesenthal worked for the U.S. Army, helping them gather documentation for the Nazi war-crime trials.

``Survival is a privilege which entails obligations,'' Wiesenthal wrote in his book ``Justice, Not Vengeance: Recollections'' (Grove, 1990). ``I am forever asking myself what I can do for those who have not survived.''
Wiesenthal was a ``postwar Holocaust hero, a Jewish hero, a universal hero,'' who came under attack ``from a lot of different directions,'' Zuroff said. The Nazi hunter was threatened on numerous occasions for his work and even survived a bomb that exploded outside his Vienna residence in 1982.

Austria's Waldheim

Wiesenthal was often criticized for refusing to denounce Austrian President Kurt Waldheim as a war criminal after Waldheim's Nazi history was discovered. Wiesenthal was never able to prove Waldheim's participation in war crimes conclusively.

In 1999, a New York federal judge appointed Wiesenthal to sit on committees established as part of a settlement of Holocaust-era claims against Austrian banks. In 2001, a $40 million compensation deal between Holocaust victims and Bank Austria was reached.

Wiesenthal received the Medal of Honor of the Yad Vashem foundation in Jerusalem, the Dutch Medal of Freedom, and the U.S. Congressional Gold Medal. In February 2004, England's Queen Elizabeth II awarded him an honorary knighthood.

90,000 Nazis

The Simon Wiesenthal Center, established in 1977 and based in Los Angeles, says it is continuing its search for Nazi war criminals, who number more than 90,000. The Israeli branch has launched publicity campaigns in Germany, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, Romania, Austria, Croatia and Hungary offering financial rewards for information leading to the arrest and conviction of Nazi war criminals.

Most recently, it located a Hungarian soldier who was part of a gang that tortured and killed a Jewish boy in 1944. In April, Hungary applied for the man's extradition from Australia.

Wiesenthal's memoirs, ``The Murderers Among Us'' (McGraw- Hill), were published in 1967. The 1978 movie ``The Boys From Brazil'' was based on Wiesenthal's life as a Nazi hunter and starred Laurence Olivier as Wiesenthal. (Thanks to Bloomberg.com for this obituary.)